A few weeks later the river started to ice up on us during the nights. Ferguson checked the charts and found us a creek with high banks, shaded by trees’. We brought the raft in and moored it securely, and hauled Doc Lampson’s cruiser up on shore by rolling it across a bunch of logs. Before long we were iced in firm, and we stayed that way for nearly two months. As bitter as Haven was, we usually didn’t have such hard winters as that one was. Ferguson said it was because of all the nukes throwing dust in the air, and seemed worried as to how long the winter was going to last.
It was a tough time for all of us. We tried to keep busy, but there wasn’t much to do. Me and some of the others did get out to do some hunting, ice fishing and scouting around, but mostly we just stayed cold and hungry, and got on each other’s nerves.
It was during the second month of being iced in that Mrs. Jackson went into labor for real. She had not been doing too well in the last few weeks, crying that she would never see her husband again, and that her baby wasn’t going to have a father. They cleared us out of the big bunkroom, and for a long time all we could hear was hushed voices and her moaning and crying. Then suddenly it was silent. Ferguson came out and said simply, “We lost them.”
We couldn’t dig a grave, so we cut a hole in the ice and buried her and the baby in the river the next day, and there were only thirteen of us left.
Excerpt--Personal Log--BMCM Timothy Ferguson, I.N.(BET):
.. . The winter is a hard one. I feel bad about Mrs. Jackson and the baby. It is less of a burden on all of us, though, not to have a new child to care for.
I keep worrying about nuclear winter. I remember reading about the “years with no summers” on Earth after the Great Patriotic Wars of the 22nd Century. I’ve been trying to listen to the commset, but not getting much. The nukes have hosed up atmospherics that were already marginal at best. I heard a fragment of a conversation the other night that might have included the word “Sauron.” I hope I’m mistaken. If it is Saurons who have invaded, I’m worried that the rest of us won’t make it even under the best of circumstances. I guess we’ll just have to trust in the Lord. . . .
The days finally started getting warmer, and the ice began to break up. It was nasty work in the cold, but we soon got Doc Lampson’s cruiser launched and were on our way. But even though we were making good progress again, Ferguson had been getting jumpier for days. The Sergius Narrows were coming up, and he’d picked me to act as his helmsman during our passage. From what he described, it was going to be nasty. The riverbed cut through a rocky area, and even though the river was wider than at any other point along its course, the channel was a twisting passage lined with rocky outcroppings. Ferguson had spent hours of my off watch time testing me on steering commands and navigation drills. Finally I’d had all I could take.
“Shit, man! You’ve done this all your life. How do you expect me to learn it all so fast?” His eyes narrowed for a second, and I thought he might take a swing at me. But then he just smiled, his eyes twinkling at me from underneath his cap brim.
“Son,” he said, “you seem to be forgetting just what kind of navy I was in. No bobbing around like a cork for old Ferguson. I was in the Imperial Space Navy. Vacuum welding in free fall, working with monocables, repairing docking collars, and conning orbital gigs; that’s what a boatswain in the space navy does. You want to know how I know all this stuff about the river? Well, here it is.”
Ferguson reached into the chart table, pulled out an ancient dog-eared book and tossed it to me. I looked at the cover. “The Haven Practical Navigator,” I read, “Originally Written by Kapitan (Vtorogo Ranga) Nikolay P. Prokofiev, CoDominium Maritime Guard, 2069 A.D. Eighty-seventh Edition. As Updated by Imperial Maritime Navigation Bureau, Haven Contingent, 2612 A.D.” The book fell open to a section in the middle. “Chapter Twelve-Navigating the Rivers of the Shangri-La Valley.”
I looked up at him. “You mean . . . we’ve been . . . you get it all from a friggin’ book?”
“Sure do,” he said.
“But aren’t you worried you’ll make a mistake? You act so sure of yourself.”
He sat down in his seat and shrugged. “Would it help anyone,” he asked, “if I let them know I was afraid?”
I looked at him with new eyes. The lines I saw on his face weren’t anger, they were weariness. But as quickly as the moment came, it passed. He stood up again and picked up the book. The arrogant grin I had become so used to pulled at his mouth and he winked at me.
“And that,” he said, “is our little secret.”
And it stayed that way.
Excerpt--Personal Log--BMCM Timothy Ferguson, I.N.(RET):
...I took a risk today. I had to. Otherwise I may have gone to pieces. It’s been getting harder and harder to hide the strain. The boy has been pretty good lately, and I really needed to unload. But I keep telling myself to keep my distance, from him and the others. There is too much at stake here for me to ruin it by being weak. ...
A couple of nights later I found out that Ferguson didn’t have just one secret. Shortly after the evening meal, Mrs. Alvarez opened the door of Ferguson’s cabin to bring him some laundry. I don’t know how she forgot to knock, but I guess it doesn’t matter. She dropped the linen she was carrying and screamed. I was just around the corner, and one of the first to get there. There was Ferguson in his underwear, with two metal legs lying across the table, one opened and partially disassembled with a tool kit beside it. He gave a small sad smile to those of us who clustered around the door. His face was red as a beet and the light of his red night light glinted off a sheen in his eyes.
“They say that if you fight someone long enough, you become like your enemy. I guess the Saurons aren’t the only ones who are half man and half monster, are they?”
Mrs. Alvarez and all of us tried hard to apologize, but he shooed us out. It was a few days after that before we saw much of Ferguson. And none of us ever worked up the courage to talk about it again.
Excerpt--Personal Log--BMCM Timothy Ferguson, I.N.(RET):
. . . They know. I’m not just a retired sailor, I’m a crippled one, half a man. But what is strange is that they don’t seem to care. I expected revulsion. Or I expected pity. What I didn’t expect them to do was treat me the same, to continue to respect me, and listen to me. Keeping the secret took more out of me than what I’ve faced since the secret got out. Funny . . .
The passage of the Narrows had proven to be easier than we had feared. Or maybe we had spent so much time preparing and planning for it that it just seemed easy. I had spent the days since then poring over the navigation book. One morning, while we sat in a side channel, I asked Ferguson, “What was a CoDominium?”
He grunted with surprise. “Didn’t they teach you any history in school, boy?”
“Sure,” I said. “Two semesters of it. One on Imperial History, and one on Haven. But I don’t remember that.”
“Hell, kid. It was the CoDominium that first colonized this sorry little planet.”
“Really?” I asked. “I thought it was the Harmonies, searching for freedom of worship. Who were these CoDominium people? Were they from Earth, too?”
Ferguson snorted. “The CoDominium was an alliance of the two greatest nations on Earth, Russia and the United States.”
I began to realize that I wasn’t going to win this one, but I was still curious. “What States were those United ones?”
Ferguson rolled his eyes. “If the Saurons hadn’t done us in, we would have done it to ourselves.” I guess he could see I was getting red, because he continued, “Hell, kid, it’s not your fault. Can’t know what the assholes didn’t teach you. History’s a hobby of mine, ‘specially military history. Want to learn some yourself?”
I agreed, and it was the smartest thing I had done in a long time. Ferguson was full of stories, and once I’d asked, used them often to while away a boring watch. I learned that Falkenberg and Lermontov were more than just names of cities, about the Patriotic Wars, a
nd about the wars that brought the Empire together. He told me the stories of ancient warriors of the Earth; Hannibal, Mao, Caesar, Nelson, Sun Tzu, Napoleon, Lee, and more. He told me things I’d never known about the Empire, and the difficulties they’d had even scraping by in the early days after the wasting of the Earth. And he could hold out for hours on the history of the Imperial Navy.
Soon I found myself pumping both him and Doc Lampson for information, and reading what books we had, hardcopy and disk. I had always hated to read, but out here on the river, with no vids or anything, there wasn’t much else to do. And daydreaming about Freya Carlson, my other favorite activity, lead to nothing but frustration. I found reading was a way I could forget my own problems and get away from it all for a while. And when I got depressed, I could think of all the things that the old-timers went through. I mean, if those old farts could face the kind of troubles they did and get by, then so could we.
Excerpt--Personal Log--BMCM Timothy Ferguson, I.N.(RET):
. . . I just realized the other day that it’s been weeks since I worried about Jimmy Schmidt. When I didn’t trust him, I didn’t get much of anything out of him. But now, the more I load him up, the better he does. In fact, he’s become a real pleasure to spend time with. Even with Castell City and the dangers of the other nuked cities coming up, I feel I’ve got someone I can depend on. Makes me wonder if maybe my own attitude was holding him back as much as anything else.
It’s a good thing he and everyone else are doing well. I’ve been feeling pretty poorly lately. I don’t think it’s sick as much as it’s nerves. After his performance in the Narrows, I’m seriously thinking of letting the kid take us through Castell. . . .
It was a dead dark truenight, cold and clear. Nila Liu and I were on the bridge of the cruiser, bundled into our two antiradiation suits, and using infrared goggles to see and trying to navigate the raft as best we could. Despite the cold, we were sweating our butts off inside the heavy suits, uncomfortable as hell. We wanted to make as much time as we could getting past the radioactive ruins of Castell City. The rest of our crew were sealed into their cabins to reduce their exposure. The city had been hit real hard, even harder than what Ferguson had described to us about Falkenberg. At one point, the river flowed through a crater, forming a large circular lake. After that it narrowed down and started looking normal again.
Just as the radiation counter indicated it was safe, and we started to pull off our hoods, the raft lurched to a stop. We ran forward to find a giant chain with links almost half the size of a man stretched across the river at water level. Beams of light bracketed the raft from each side of the river and an amplified voice boomed out.
“Lay down any weapons and stand by to be boarded, by the order of the Free Shangri-La Militia.”
A boat came putting up with a skinny guy at the bow, dressed in a brown uniform with gold bars on his collar. He was flanked by two grim faced men in undecorated uniforms of the same color, each with a laser rifle held at high port. He stepped aboard and strutted up to me.
“The State of Free Shangri-La has established a complete embargo on unauthorized river traffic. Who are you, and why are you ignoring our rulings?” he demanded.
A firm voice came out of the darkness by the shack. “I think,” it said, “that you should be addressing the question to me, son.”
A figure stepped out of the darkness and I had to fight hard to keep my eyes from bugging right out of my head. It was Ferguson, but he didn’t look anything like our Ferguson. He was dressed in crisp khakis with mirror-shined shoes and a black-visored hat with a gold anchor on the front. His chest was covered with bright ribbons, and a gold cross on a black ribbon was suspended around his neck.
“Master Chief Boatswain Timothy Ferguson, Imperial Navy,” he said, “And whom do I have the pleasure of addressing?”
I wasn’t the only one whose eyes were bugging. The skinny officer was amazed. “Lieutenant Art Lamont, at your service, sir,” he stammered.
Ferguson was in rare form. He gave that officer a story about a secret Imperial mission with such a serious face that even I started to believe it. Within five minutes he had the Lieutenant apologizing to us and writing out a safe conduct pass to help us in the event we ran into any of their patrols downriver. It seemed that down here on the Xanadu, there was still some semblance of a government left, a fact that might allow us to make time without worrying so much about being attacked. The officer took off in his boat and they dipped the chain enough for us to slip over it.
I looked hard at Ferguson, whose face was poker calm. “How the hell did you do that?” I asked.
“Son,” he said, with his face finally splitting into a grin, “any chief worth his salt can get what he wants from a shavetail officer, and leave the officer thinking it was his own idea to do it that way in the first place. The secret of the relationship between officers and chiefs is that even though we chiefs run things, we let them think they do.”
Excerpt--Personal Log--BMCM Timothy Ferguson, I.N.(RET):
. . . It was the kind of moment you live for . . .
After we passed Castell City, we found a lot more signs of civilization. The “State of Free Shangri-La,” as they called themselves, had kept order pretty well. We even found ourselves able to pull alongside the river at some of the small villages along the way and trade. But we didn’t stay anywhere too long. We found that our raft, and especially Doc Lampson’s cruiser, attracted the envy of the people we traded with. Although there was no violence, we did have to pull the cover off our chain gun on at least one occasion to intimidate some people. But even with the strain of these contacts, we began to feel safer than we had since we had left home. Our biggest problem was that some of us, especially Mr. Carlson, began to push to end the journey. His wife, Sarah, had never really recovered from losing her son, Jon, during the Slaughter, and she had been getting pretty sick lately. But Ferguson continued to insist that we keep going until we reached the Jacksonville people, down near the escarpment. It was kind of hard to argue with a man who had so much experience with war, so most of the rest of us just kept out of it.
Excerpt--Personal Log--BMCM Timothy Ferguson, I.N.(RET):
. .. Mrs. Carlson worries me. But I’m not sure what good stopping will do. I’m not even sure the Jacksonville people will welcome us, even with the ties we already have with them. If we stop up here, we probably won’t mix with anyone else, and 13 people is just too small a group to survive on their own. So we press on, and I’ll have to shoulder the responsibility. . . .
I was lying outside on the bow, trying to get some sleep. My recurring nightmare had come again, the one where I kept seeing the kid I’d killed during the Slaughter, his face frozen into a grimace of pain, and his guts streaming from his open belly.
I wasn’t too surprised I had my dream. We were all pretty depressed. Mrs. Carlson had died during the day.
She’d been bedridden for weeks and finally just faded away. Freya was a wreck, and had cried herself to sleep. It made my heart ache to see her in such pain. I wished I could hold her and tell her things would be all right.
All of a sudden, I heard a shot, and bolted upright. I hollered to get folk’s attention, and ran for my battle station. I looked around to see where the shot had come from, but didn’t see anything. The others were rushing around, too, but it was soon quiet as everyone came to a stop at their stations, scanning the night.
Then a scream cut through the night, and all hell broke loose. It was Mrs. Liu. She’d just found Kjell Carlson. He’d taken one of the pistols and put a bullet through his head, falling across the body of his wife. Now there were only eleven of us left, and Freya, whose parents had been spared up till then, had lost them both in just a few short hours.
Mrs. Alvarez went in with Freya to comfort her and hopefully get her back to sleep. Ferguson, for some odd reason, decided that the rest of us should work through the night to fix some things on the raft. It was a darkday, so after a light brea
kfast, I bunked out alone in one of the cabins. Just as I was dozing off, I felt warm breath on my face, and Freya slipped into my sleeping bag with me. If she was wearing anything, it wasn’t much. I tried to say something, but she put her hand over my mouth and then pulled it away and kissed me hard. I started to kiss her back when something smacked me in the back of my head. I was so tangled up with sleeping bag and girl that I could only turn my head. It was Mrs. Alvarez, shining a flashlight into my eyes.
“You should be ashamed of yourself, Jim,” she scolded. “This poor girl is vulnerable, and here you are taking advantage of her.”
She looked at Freya. “Honey, I know you’re hurting, but this is no way to make that hurt go away. Get dressed and I’ll let you stay with me.”
Freya started to cry as she put on her robe and slipped out the door. Mrs. Alvarez turned to me again. “Before you think of trying anything again, think of how we had to bury Terri Jackson. We can’t afford to have little Freya pregnant.”
I laid there a long time awake. My guts were churning and my head was spinning. Now that Freya was gone I felt kind of funny. It was not something I admitted, especially with the bunch I used to run around with, but I was still a virgin. I had a basic idea of what was supposed to happen, but I almost felt relieved that Mrs. Alvarez had saved me from showing my ignorance. And I couldn’t believe what Freya and I were going to do just a few hours after the death of her parents. All the stupid deaths. I began to wonder if any of us would make it to the end of this journey.
Excerpt--Personal Log--BMCM Timothy Ferguson, I.N.(RET):
. .. More deaths, and worst of all a suicide. Suicide is like poison on a ship. It might as well be a contagious disease, the way it spreads depression and hopelessness. And in the midst of all our other problems, a goddamn romance seems to be brewing. This is going to take some thinking. It’s a no win situation. If we break them up, they’ll both be moping around for weeks. If we don’t break them up, they’ll be mooning around for weeks. Either way, the boy who is fast becoming my right hand man is going to be an emotional basket case... .
War World IV: Invasion Page 15
